The steep cost of unstructured, disparate pension documents

Customer Success Stories

By digitizing and centralizing unstructured dark data, customers gain visibility into physical documentation and structured data. This enhanced visibility helps prevent ineligible pension claims, both past and future. By consolidating digitized documents with various formats and storage locations into a single, searchable platform, pension records management and reporting improve, reducing financial risks.

January 15, 20255 mins
The steep cost of unstructured, disparate pension documents

Industry

Healthcare

Challenge

Disparate records create costly, risk-laden pension administration

Solution

Iron Mountain InSight® Digital Experience Platform (DXP)

Value

By digitizing and centralizing unstructured dark data, customers gain visibility into physical documentation and structured data. This enhanced visibility helps prevent ineligible pension claims, both past and future. By consolidating digitized documents with various formats and storage locations into a single, searchable platform, pension records management and reporting improve, reducing financial risks.

How important is finding pension documentation quickly? For one large healthcare organization, it recently gained multi-million-dollar importance. That’s because the organization had to pay millions of dollars in ineligible pension benefits. Why? Because the company could not locate the appropriate documentation to confirm the eligibility of claims. The legal system ruled that the organization is liable to pay employee pension claims without evidence to disprove a claim’s eligibility.

While inaccessible, disparate documentation may be frustrating— and commonplace in many organizations—the high cost of unsearchable, unfindable pension documents spurred the healthcare organization to take action. The organization turned to Iron Mountain for help. Iron Mountain InSight® Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is creating a unified platform for newly digitized documents and digitally-native records gathered from various departments, including prior acquisitions. With relevant searchable metadata being captured from the different digital records, the consolidated data will be searchable, forming a structured digital library of pension information. The result? The healthcare company is mitigating future financial risk and is saving over $2 million annually from identifying “duplicate” pension payments.

Lost in disparate records

After multiple acquisitions, many with antiquated and disordered records, the healthcare organization’s pension department had a culmination of document formats—such as paper, microfilm, CD, and digital— spread across many locations and legacy systems. Navigating these records to find required regulatory documentation became difficult to impossible.

In addition, changes in staff, communication gaps, and budget restrictions exacerbated the company’s records management challenges. Often, when a former employee requested pension benefits compensation, the appropriate documentation could not be found to confirm the claim’s eligibility. Without “findable” documentation, pension benefit payments had to be made to the former employee.

Digitizing and organizing on a unified platform

First, Iron Mountain is assisting by converting all document formats, including hand-written papers, into digital form, identifying key data to extract. The extracted and distinguishable information enriches the record with metadata to enhance searchability. All relevant documentation associated with a plan participant is tagged with the same metadata to provide staff with a comprehensive view of the aggregated information. An estimated 2.5 million paper images are being digitized, alongside microfilm and CD/ DVD conversions, creating a complete repository of digitized and searchable pension information.

Second, Iron Mountain is helping the healthcare organization migrate its legacy systems to InSight DXP, a scalable, low-code software-as-a- service (SaaS) platform that housed all pension information. This includes enrollment forms, form 5500, the summary of annual reports, and 1099-R forms. The “structured and searchable” records are quickly parsed and aggregated using an automated workflow guided by business rules. The employee profile will have information linking date of birth and employee ID, date of hire, and termination date. It can answer many questions like, “Is there a 1099R? Is there a settlement amount that matches the lump sum? Is there a pension calculation report?” If the automated workflow identifies missing information or relationships, it flags a pension employee, using human- in-the-loop (HITL) capabilities, for quality control verification. Pension employees now have an accessible, searchable system to quickly answer employee and regulatory queries.

Further, InSight DXP provided the required security protocols to safeguard data and documentation. The healthcare organization is also applying record retention disciplines to ensure efficient document management and minimize business risk.

Reaping the benefits

InSight DXP is delivering many benefits to the healthcare organization, helping it transition from the unknown to certainty and clarity. Upon deployment, the company will validate paid claims faster and more accurately, saving over $1 million in claims liability. The InSight DXP platform is providing scalability for future growth, including adding additional automated intelligent document processing (IDP) workflows while maintaining records retention controls and reducing compliance risks.

Existing pension plan claims being paid are being audited. Claims being incorrectly paid will have documented evidence for the organization to return to the courts for relief from paying ineligible claims. Going forward, it will see pension liabilities and prepare for future payments. When making additional company acquisitions, the inherited physical and digital records can easily follow the defined workflows in InSight DXP, making the new company information easily searchable—improving efficiency and giving the healthcare organization more control.

Next, the organization plans to tap into InSight DXP’s additional functionality by leveraging more workflows, “chat with a document,” artificial intelligence capabilities, and advanced protocol interfaces (APIs) to connect to other systems, enhancing audit readiness and driving additional operational efficiencies.

Want to learn more about how Iron Mountain InSight DXP can help you?